Indentured Servitude
(This article part of a series on Raw Dealz. You can help by expanding it.) Indentured Servitude is a form of Debt Bondage, established in the early American colonies by covenant between shipping firms, colony landowners, and plantation overseers, and is still in use in many, albeit De facto, forms today. History Originally marketed as a means by which poor youth in the British Isles and the more Saxon of the Teutonic states of Germania could secure the then-expensive passage to the New World despite a lack of personal liquid capital, Indentured Servants would sell their autonomy to a shipping firm in the form of a document that guaranteed their obedience and labor for a fixed number of years, usually four to seven, which upon arrival was sold to employers in the colonies to execute as they saw fit. The enforcement of the indentured servitude agreements was upheld by colonial law and enforced by courts, with runaways and escaped servants being returned to their masters. Indentured Servants were exploited as cheap labor and were almost universally mistreated, beaten, malnourished, and if not literally raped, soul-raped. In many cases the beatings dealt by the masters were in fact deadly, and with the Indentured Servants receiving no clothing allowances or sufficient food to maintain health, were treated equal to if not worse than Slaves, the logic being that the more expensive permanent property required more care to ensure longevity and thus a return on investment, whereas Indentured Servants would be necessarily freed in a matter of years and more cheap arrivals were easily acquired. The similarity of circumstances between Indentured Servants and Slaves and their outnumbering the landed gentry actually inspired many to band together against their masters resulting in not a few pan-racial conspiracies to murder, escape, and commit worker's rebellions, but in matter of decades this social ailment was remedied by the invention of Racism. Most potential servants caught on to the reality of Indentured Servitude by the 19th century, and with the Industrial Revolution making it economically possible to extend humanism to include the poors (as a revolution-prevention scheme, of course), official Indentured Servitude ended in early 20th century. Modern Indentured Servitude Despite the disappearance of the indentured servitude agreement for a fixed number of years with a single master, Debt Bondage has by no means vanished as the primary means of securing cheap labor from the majority of Americans of Anglo-Saxon, Saxon, and Teutonic descent. If anything it has expanded to every race, ethnicity, and nationality of American and become significantly more similar to slavery in its indefinite duration and society's total commitment to the dogma and constant espousal of its necessity. Today the majority of young Americans enter Debt Bondage in the form of loans taken for college tuition and living expenses for the duration of their time in college. Identically to Indentured Servitude, students undertake their voluntary bondage on the promise of later autonomy in an elevated social standing marketed as more apt to benefit them in the long run. Coincidentally, attending a University until the receipt of a bachelor's degree also takes most “students” four to seven years, but the bondage does not begin until the end of those four to seven years, making the actual time spent in college more akin to the adventurous sea voyage to the New World than the backbreaking Indentured Servitude itself, and an indefinite period thereafter being the time in which autonomy is actually sacrificed and work required, the only real difference being that for whom the graduate works is up to the graduate rather than stipulated by contract. While corporal punishment has gone by the wayside in modern times, and an abundance of cheaply available food has ended the neglectful malnourishment of even those in college, attempts at escape are punished by social ostracization, and in the place of courts and bounty hunters are parental shaming and threats. And, perhaps most nightmarish of modern debt bondage, upon no longer being students, young adults are all but required to purchase a car in order to make it to work or to live near public transportation in urban areas much more expensive to live in, and upon being steadily employed are universally encouraged to purchase property on which to live, which extends their servitude another 15 years in a booming economy and 30 years in a weaker, recessing, or depressed economy, with 30 year mortgages now more or less the norm. Furthermore, those in debt bondage are encouraged to return to school at various points in their “career” in order to gain more specialization and are socially pressured to marry with a large celebration and soon thereafter have children, incurring expenses thereby that are unlikely to be covered by the average income if the debt bound servant is also paying off student, car, and home loans. Thus the modern Indentured Servant is bound to debt for life on the false promise of autonomy and achievement. Owning massive amount of debt makes the servant desperate to pay it off, and thus willing to accept lower wages in exchange for promise of employment, and far too busy from work and too terrified of falling behind in payments to mount any sort of full scale revolution against the current debt-based system. Thus, the greatest vehicle of mass social control in history has been evolved from serfdom under the guise of self-governance and genuine opportunity to rise above the station one was born in.